Hello 'gmarie',
<<I thought that the spirit of Ebay was bidding and the highest bidder got it.>>
You're right, that is the spirit of it all. The practice, well, now, that is something else again.
Did you not get a notice announcing your bids were cancelled and saying what the reason was?
Most sellers choose "Item is no longer available", -- to which we invariably snort, scoff and finish with
"...at that price"!
Were your sellers fairly new? Ebay encourages sellers to list with auctions at low start bids, erroneously
leading sellers to believe that bidding wars will result and the item prices will shoot up and off the page.
If it is a highly sought after item, that could happen.
And popular items generally see the prices zip up in the last hour, sometimes the last seconds, of an auction.
But if the item has a value higher than the standing bid as the auction ends, too many sellers are not
willing to take that chance.
(And sellers talk about non-paying bidders being time wasters!)
There is nothing you can do about it, annoying as it is. After all, there is every chance that the item broke
before the end of the auction. Perhaps the seller saw some damage on it he hadn't noticed before and had
to end for that reason. There could be any number of truly good reasons.
I'd say just watch the sellers' listings to see if they relist at a more sensible price. Who knows, it may be less
that you were willing to pay anyway. It's not likely they will relist at the same low start price.
Long-time sellers don't usually list low because they have learned the folly in doing so. Annoying as it is, try
to go easy on your sellers if they need a bit of practice to sort it all out.
Well, you didn't really want to 'steal' their items, did you?
